When I was with my family on vacation in spain, and my son was playing in a playground, a girl told him “I’m a princess, you’re a knight, fetch me a glass of water!”. It was then that I realized that a princess typically isn’t someone to save. I was so proud of my son when he said “no”, because I suddenly realized how hard it is to escape the shackles of that special story.

A princess is the one person in the country, who reigns surpreme in both hierarchy and social standing. People in stories might hate the king, but the princess is beloved by most.

Scientific institutions1 currently base a large part of their internal evaluation, their comparison to others, and their hiring decisions on counting publication (with a number of different scorings).

And this is dumb.

On the surface this causes pressure to publish as many papers as possible2 which drives down quality of publications to the lowest standard reviewers accept.3 And it strengthens a hierarchy of publishers, where some publications are worth more than others based on the name of the journal. That simplifies funding decisions. But makes them worse. And it creates an incentive to get a maximum of prestige with a minimum of substance.

For this article scientific institutions mainly means those state-actors who finance scientists and those private actors who employ scientists and compete for state funding. ↩

The problem here is pressure to inflate the impact metrics of publications. Publishing should be about communicating research, not about boosting ones job opportunities. ↩

This argument is based on discussions I had with many other scientists over the years, along with experiences like seeing that people split publications into several papers to increase the publication count, even though that does not improve the publication itself. It is also based on the realization that few scientists I met were still following all publications in their sub-field. For a longer reasoning see information challenges in scientific communication. ↩

Not every place will become this uninhabitable. But almost every place will have huge adaptation cost. See Hansen et al. 2016. Let’s hope we rolled a 2-6; and let’s stop ruining our odds. We need to go green. ↩

JSON, the javascript object notation format, is everywhere
nowadays. But there are 3 facts which will challenge its dominance.

CPU cores are not getting much faster.

You can rent VMs per core, and you pay per core.

The network is still getting faster and cheaper, and HTTP/2 reduces the minimum cost per file.

Due to these changes, servers will become CPU bound again, and basic
data structures on the web will become much more relevant. But the most efficient parsing of
JSON requires guessing the final data structure while reading the
data.

Therefore the changing costs will bring a comeback for binary data structures,
and WebAssembly will provide efficient parsers and emitters in the
clients.

ArneBab@-jtT… wrote : Yes. And that’s one of the reasons why we need Freenet: to wrestle back control over our communication channel.

Good luck getting people to use it though.

Yes, that’s something we need to fix. And there’s a lot we can do for that. It’s just a lot of boring work.

Let’s go through your points and see which we could fix:

I can't use Freenet. It's illegal! It isn't? How do you know?

It’s created by a registered tax-exempt charity1, how can it be illegal?

The Freenet Project Inc is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, with the mission "to assist in developing and disseminating technological solutions to further the open and democratic distribution of information". It is registered under EIN 95-4864038. ↩

If you do not want to have a child right now, but you want to have a fulfilled heterosexual sex-life, pregnancy is a risk which can hit anyone, however careful he or she is to avoid it. This is an answer I gave someone who equated unintentional pregnancy with questionable morals.

If you use condoms perfectly every single time you have sex, they’re 98% effective at preventing pregnancy. But people aren’t perfect, so in real life condoms are about 82% effective — that means about 18 out of 100 people who use condoms as their only birth control method will get pregnant each year.

Other means of birth control are around 70-91% effective, with the sole exception of the implant which has 99% effectiveness, so even if people are perfectly hygienic and careful, there will be many pregnancies: if you are perfectly hygienic and careful for 10 years, there will be around one pregnancy per couple (on average).

Update: Leonid Schneider from forbetterscience notes that there’s a whole dungeon of misconduct which might be facilitated by “living papers”. We need investigate problems in depth before changing established processes. Scientific communication is a complex process. Publication is an important part of it.

Firstoff: The underlying problem which makes it so hard to differenciate between honest errors and fraud is that publications are kind of a currency in science.